Haskell Weekly News: Julyl 18, 2009

Welcome to issue 126 of HWN, a newsletter covering
developments in the Haskell community.

Hac phi is next
weekend! With almost 30 people already registered, it looks like we're going
to have a fantastic time hacking in Philadelphia. It's still not too late to
register!

Announcements

GHC 6.10.4. Ian Lynagh
announced
a new patchlevel release of GHC, 6.10.4. This version
has very few changes over 6.10.3, but fixes some
bugs that could be critical for a few users. See the release
notes for details.

shelltestrunner 0.6 released. Simon
Michael
announced
the first release of shelltestrunner,
a small tool for testing any command-line program by running it through
"shell" tests defined with a simple file format.

generator 0.5.1. Yair Chuchem
announced
the release of the generator package,
which implements an alternative list monad transformer, a list class,
and related functions.

GLURaw 1.0.0.0. Sven Panne
announced
a new GLURaw
package, containing full support for all GLU functionality and similar
in spirit to the OpenGLRaw package: it is a 1:1 mapping of the C interface,
no libraries or headers are needed at build time, and the GLU API entries
are resolved dynamically at runtime.

OpenGLRaw 1.0.1.0. Sven Panne
announced
a new version of the OpenGLRaw package,
which adds support for a number of OpenGL extensions.

ObjectName 1.0.0.0. Sven Panne
announced
a (tiny) new package, ObjectName,
which contains a class corresponding to the general notion of explicitly
handled identifiers for API objects, e.g. a texture object name in OpenGL
or a buffer object name in OpenAL.

StateVar 1.0.0.0. Sven Panne
announced
the StateVar
package, which further modularizes the OpenGL/OpenAL packages. It
implements state variables, which are references in the IO monad, like
IORefs or parts of the OpenGL state.

data-ordlist-0.0.1 and NumberSieves-0.0. Leon Smith
announced
the release of two new packages: Data.OrdList
offers a convenient way for efficiently dealing with lists that
you happen to know are ordered, and includes operations such as
union, merge, exclusive union, intersection, and difference. NumberSieves
includes the Sieve of O'Neill, from "The Geniune Sieve of Eratosthenes"
by Melissa O'Neill, which offers an incremental primality sieve based on
priority queues. Also included are two array-based generalizations of
the Sieve of Eratosthenes: one for factoring a large quantity of small
numbers, and another for calculating the phi function for a large quantity
of small numbers.

graphviz-2999.0.0.0. Ivan Lazar Miljenovic
announced
a new release of the graphviz
package for Haskell, which provides bindings to the GraphViz suite of tools. The biggest
and most important change in this release is that all 152 attributes
utilised/supported by GraphViz are now specified and supported.

darcs 2.3 beta 4. Petr Rockai
announced
another darcs 2.3 beta release, which features better Windows support. If
you're on Windows, you should be able to install it with 'cabal install
darcs-beta' -- give it a try!

Quotes of the Week

Berengal: For me, understanding
the basics/reasoning behind haskell's type system was just a minute meditating
on the phrase "what's the square root of hello?"

bitwize: The oleg is to functional studliness as the farad is
to capacitance: a hopelessly large base unit.

maartenm:
euclidate: to promote a conjecture to an axiom just for the sake of
simplicity

RobertGreaye: Some suggest the original
English remained in Britain when the North American colonies were founded;
others claim it was brought to the Americas by the British settlers,
leaving a pale imitation back in Britain. The truth is much stranger:
the original English was actually smuggled out of Britain to the West
Indies in a wardrobe belonging to General Sir Ralph Abercromby, where
it ended up on the island of Trinidad after Sir Ralph took possession
of that territory in the name of the British Crown.